Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it, but because it could
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Precisely - as Steve Jobs observed, sometimes people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Stadia does seem like a solution in search of a problem. For Microsoft a relevant problem is "How can we enable smartphone (or other non-console, non-PC computing device) gamers to play (and rent/pay for) Xbox games without porting them to/shrinking them onto Android or iOS and without cannibalizing the sales of Xbox consoles or Windows PCs?" But Google doesn't exactly have that problem.
Stadia does solve the problem of "how can I play (some) PC games on my phone/smart TV/PC without a great graphics card." So it does provide some clear user benefit, but it doesn't have compelling advantages over other cloud gaming services, and it doesn't seem to align directly with Google's business interests.
You can buy a pretty great console for $500, and it'll last 5+ years. Well under $10/month, even if you buy a little late in the cycle.
I just don't see where any cloud gaming service has room to compete with that and actually turn a profit.
Technologically, the model of subsidizing consoles to put great hardware in your living room for not much money is a good one. You get ultra-low latency, games can work offline if need be, the experience is predictable and robust once installed and you can actually own the games. In practice it requires a willingness to commit to big expensive CDNs, download optimization, and smooth updates that Microsoft just don't seem willing to make. Streaming would appear to fix that regardless of other merits.
That said, I never looked at Stadia. We (me+fiancé) just don't play enough games to warrant changing anything right now, and we tend to pick the platform based on the game not the other way around.
You can also purchase games on your phone and send a request to your console to download and install it so that it's ready when you want to play.
/xoogler
Sunray failed not because people didn't want utility computing. They clearly do - utility computing kiosks are absolutely everywhere. Sunray failed because the Sunos/solaris userspace wasn't adequate to provide a utility computing experience people wanted. In fact it was total garbage. You can see it there in the screenshots. CDE, a desktop only a mother could love. No applications worth a damn except Lotus. I worked as a contractor at a large bank and when Novell refused to say that Lotus 123 was y2k compliant they ripped out 2 sun workstations from every trader's desktop and replaced them with windows boxes. They literally had a skip/dumpster outside the building where you could go pick up sun hardware they had chucked out. The only good userspace tooling on Solaris around 1998 was for developers and even there the sun workshop debugger was pretty sketchy[1]. I speak as someone who owned a Spark 5 at home and had solaris workstations on my desk at multiple jobs. I really wanted to love Sun and kind of did love Sun hardware, but their userspace was always severely lacking.
Likewise Stadia didn't fail because people don't want cloud gaming. The success of Nvidia GForce Now and Nintendo's new stream-things-to-switch architecture for several new games proves that[2]. Logitech is also about to come out with a cloud-based mobile gaming device (although that may struggle to compete with Steam Deck which is a device you own for about the same price point). Stadia failed because Google completely failed to look at competitive offerings like GamePass and offer something compelling as an alternative. Instead they did a full-price cash grab on the games and just said "trust us" to keep the service running (which everyone knew they would not honour and they did not honour).
[1] This debugger has the unique distinction of being the only debugger to ever core dump on me when I was trying to load the core dump of the program I was trying to debug.
Altho hn'ers are not very exposed to it, many large enterprises run with thousands of users on "virtual desktop farms", like, this is huge part of citrix / vmware business model.
Also - it was a very different and opposite approach to what Java was doing at the time. Java didn't have any notion of UI streaming like NeWS. It ran UI locally, always. So it's pretty unclear how much Sun really bought into the SunRay vision. They certainly didn't align everything around it.
People didn’t trust stadia to deliver and to not stop delivering. And I believe their pricing model played to their weakness and against their strength.
But of course I want to play cyber punk on max res on my Nintendo switch. What a silly thing to say consumers don’t want that.
If Google had spent one more year thinking through how the business was going to work they may have had something, but instead they made some tech no one asked for but worked well and and just shipped it.
Isn't that what people do when they buy games on Steam?
Theoretically, the Stadia system and the game content could be open sourced, but that isn’t something Google is likely to do, and since the games are entirely streamed, there aren’t any local copies floating around.
It would be great if Stadia developers got together and made a new self-hostable streaming application that could play their ports, or at least used the ports to help the community figure out a server that streamed the games close to spec.
Stadia is weak on platform exclusives, but I wouldn't mind if every PC game announced at E3 (for example) had a demo you could stream via Stadia or some other cloud gaming service.
Edit: I didn't realize Google was shutting down Stadia. Unsurprising but also sad because it was cool and a lot of people put a lot of work into it. It clearly died before finding its feet, although it's not clear that it would.
It lacked the titles, game play wasn't smooth, and just wasn't what people wanted.
So I would say that it failed to meet market demands, and failed to deliver on what it said it would.
Even support for engines like Unity came on the second year, as the adoption was still quite lackluster, and even that did not help, one of their talks at GDC this year was how they were rebooting the development stack.
https://stadia.dev/blog/join-stadia-at-the-google-for-games-...
Apply named "How to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch".